1.3 – A simple, but cruel people.
From the Chronicon Terrae Prussiae by Peter of Dusburg (1300): “The Prussians did not know God. Being a simple people, they could not reach Him with their intellect, and since they had no writing, they could not understand Him even through the Holy Scriptures. They were very surprised when they were told that human beings are capable of passing their thoughts even to someone not present through writing. Since they did not know God, they fell into the error of worshipping every creature as a god, that is, the sun, the moon, the stars, thunder, birds, all quadrupeds, even toads. They had sacred woods, fields and watercourses, in which it was not allowed to cut down trees, plow the ground or fish. But they were also prone to that aberration which translates into violence, wickedness and all the other atrocities that the ‘children of Belial’ can commit.”
Peter of Dusburg, to reconstruct the complex Prussian events, composes the Gesta Dei per fratres Ordinis Teutonici. The inability to oppose the systematic, violent enterprises of the native Prussians had been one of the reasons that had pushed Duke Conrad of Masovia to call the Teutonic Brothers to his aid. In vain the first bishop of Prussia, the Cistercian Christian, a monk of the abbey of Oliva near Gdansk, had exhorted the gentiles “to abandon idolatry and to honor the true God, Jesus Christ”: initially they remained at peace with their neighbors and did not harass them, but then the devil “aroused a very harsh persecution against the Christians; within a few years some of them were slaughtered, others captured and forced into perpetual slavery, few saved themselves by fleeing, while the Prussians completely devastated the Kulmerland, reducing it to a desert.”
The ineptitude of Duke Conrad unleashed the pagans who repeatedly invaded Poland with a large armed force, causing immense damage: they burned the houses, put the men to the sword, took the women and children away and if by chance some pregnant woman, about to give birth, was not able to follow them, they killed her; they even tore newborns from their mothers’ arms, and then killed them by impaling them on hedge stakes. The territory was so plundered that of all the fortresses and castles the duke had only one left, that of Plock, located on the Vistula River. Furthermore, 250 parish churches, monasteries of secular and spiritual clerics, chapels, monks’ cenobites, and nuns’ convents were set on fire. “They killed priests, regular clerics, secular priests: some they massacred outside the churches, others inside, several on the altar while celebrating the mysteries of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Not only that: they threw the consecrated hosts on the ground, mocking and ridiculing God, and trampled them. They dragged away chalices, ampoules, other church vessels, corporals, sacred vestments intended for divine worship and made sacrilegious uses of them, just as they violently snatched virgins consecrated to God from the cloisters, forcing them to basely satisfy their infamous desires.”
Who were the Teutonic Knights, who – as Dusburg depicts them – all intent on expanding the borders of Christianity and full (perhaps too full) of religious fervor, opposed their chests to such malefactors? Here are a couple of portraits, relating to periods around 1249: “No one, except He to whom every heart opens and hides no secret, knows what a pure, irreproachable, chaste life the brothers of Balga and the other castles led and what rigorous discipline they followed. Never or only rarely were the chapels without someone in prayer; in those castles there was not a corner where, after compline or matins, some brother did not isolate himself to macerate his body with rods. One day some members of the Order arrived at the castle of Engelsberg who, carefully observing the attitude and behavior of those brothers, asked them what the name of the fortress was. Since the answer was Engelsberg, that is, ‘mountain of angels’, they replied: ‘Indeed the name matches the facts, because those who live there lead an angelic life’.”
“At Christburg the brothers lived in devotion to God, admirably adhering to continence and observance of the rule, while in battle they were valiant warriors. Thus, it could be stated that in the castle they led a life of monks, on the field a life of soldiers. Among those brothers there was one, originally from Gleißberg, truly pious and irreproachable: during Good Friday, while the sacred function was taking place in the church, he – kneeling as usual – was bending to kiss the cross, when suddenly the wooden image of the crucifix rose and spread its arms, as if to embrace him. But that brother, considering himself unworthy, said: ‘Lord, you must not embrace such a despicable sinner’. Another brother also lived in the castle; this man, who maintained this custom until death, girded his hips on his bare skin with a thick iron chain, using it as a sort of nocturnal hairshirt.”
The Teutonic Knights moved from Venice, where they had taken refuge after the fall of Acre in the Holy Land, to Germany under the leadership of Hermann von Salza and concentrated in Conrad’s Masovia, building castles in strategic positions and starting expeditions against the Prussians. Hermann, however, slowed down operations waiting for a confirmation not only papal but also imperial. With the Golden Bull of Rimini signed by Innocent III, Frederick II and Von Salza in 1226, the legal framework that guaranteed possession of the territories converted by the Order was consolidated, partly to the Knights and partly to the Church, a framework that was also extended to Livonia, where other convulsive events were happening simultaneously. The few knights who had accompanied the monk Meinhard on his mission in Livonia, a land made up of present-day Latvia and southern Estonia, had begun operations with him in Ikskile, along the Daugava, where even today the ruins of the first settlements are visible, with small sorties to defend the church built there and to protect the few Livonians already converted.
But the Livonian resistance, although not as fierce as that of the Prussians of Prussia, precipitated events. While the Teutonic Knights were establishing themselves in Poland on the borders of Prussia, the Church sent its missionaries to the eastern part of the Baltic Countries, for the moment avoiding Lithuania, which resembled a more organized Feudal State and one willing to convert spontaneously with its great kings Mindaugas and Vitautas. Having returned to its pagan rites, Lithuania, which would become a grand duchy, would instead be the greatest obstacle for the Teutonic Knights in the 1300s, until defeating them together with the Poles in 1410. But even in the splendid Livonia, rich in pastures and waters, things would not progress by peaceful means alone. The traveler who today travels through these countries, almost intact in their primeval beauty, cannot in any way imagine in such nature such a climate of violence and hate that lasted two hundred years almost without interruption.
The original spiritual motivations were overwhelmed in operational practice by the power ambitions of the German Knights, whose leaders had seen from the beginning an enormous opportunity for the Order’s affirmation through the construction of a new political entity in a space in Europe still free from the domination of powers already organized in previous centuries. The simultaneous cooling of relations between the Papacy and the Empire favored this project, also igniting serious conflicts between local bishops and Knights, with very negative results for the unity of Christians itself, precursors of the wars triggered by the Protestant Reformation three centuries later. The divergence between the holy aims of the statutes of the Military Orders and the means employed in wars, where, faced with the inevitable numerical superiority of their adversaries, they sought to inflict maximum terror on the civil societies involved, led over time to harsh conflicts directly with the Church that had created them. Like creatures born to do angelic things and instead becoming demons to be destroyed. Many conflicts, also for reasons of temporal power, became occasions for public trials, for the repudiation and progressive cancellation of the Orders’ power, ultimately reduced to a sort of charitable confraternities in exchange for formal honors granted to members.
